This site requires JavaScript to be fully functional. Please activate JavaScript in your browser settings to get the best user experience.We use cookies to give you the best experience we can. If you continue, we'll assume you're happy to receive all cookies from the website.More about our cookiesGetting the best from Aegon.co.uk We're sorry, but Aegon.co.uk isn't supported by your current browser. It might function, but won't look like it would on a supported browser. We suggest you download a supported version of the browser to view Aegon.co.uk

Risk and return

Balancing risk and return in your investments

Almost all investments come with a degree of risk that you could lose money. Generally speaking, the more risk you’re willing to take, the more potential you have for seeing your investment grow in value over the long term. On the flip side, greater risk typically means a greater chance of losing money, particularly over the short term. Before investing, it’s important for you to work out how much risk you’re prepared to take, and weigh this up against the possible return you’re hoping for.

Generally, equities (company shares) are the riskiest asset class with historically the greatest potential for growth over the long term. Cash is the safest asset classes, but the least likely to keep pace with inflation. Investing in a mix of investments, countries and industries can be safer than investing in just one as falls in one investment can be offset by potential rises in others.

The illustration shows the relationship between the main investment types in terms of risk and return. It's just for illustration and shows that generally, you'd expect equities to outperform property, cash and bonds over the long term (five years or more) but you'd also expect the losses to be greater.

Of course, this isn't guaranteed and is just intended as a guide.

Understanding volatility

When talking about risk, investment professionals often refer to ‘volatility’. This is the degree to which an investment’s value rises or falls over a period of time. The riskier an investment is, the more volatility you should be prepared for.

The chart below illustrates how the various different types of investment performed in terms of both volatility and return over the last 19 years.

The potential ups

Emerging market shares are typically the riskiest type of investment. You can see below that these were the top performing investment over this period, but they were also the most volatile (risky). If you’d invested £1,000 in an emerging markets fund at the start of 1999, you might have had £7,059 at the end of 2017.

At the other end of the scale, if you’d invested £1,000 in cash over this 19 year period, you might have ended up with £1,713 at the end of 2017.

This is just an illustration, as past performance is no guide to the future. There's no guarantee that returns in the future will be similar.

Ups and downs of investments over long term

Key:

Emerging markets shares

Property

Global shares

Global bonds

Cash

The possible downs

The chart above also shows you that emerging markets shares (the blue line above) can be very volatile, with some pretty extreme ups and downs over the period. In contrast, cash grew fairly steadily with very few fluctuations.

To give you an idea of the impact of this volatility, over the credit crunch period in 2008 and 2009 (the biggest market shock in recent times), emerging markets shares fell 44% from £3,750 to £2,091 between June and December 2008. Cash, on the other hand, did not fall at all in value during the crisis (on a month by month basis). All the other investment types suffered falls to a greater or lesser degree during the crisis.

How much risk can you live with?

The key to living with risk, as the 'Ups and downs of investments over long term' chart above shows, is often your investment period.

If you have a long period before your target retirement date, you can perhaps take the risk of your investments falling sharply in value but still have enough time to recover and, hopefully, be rewarded in the long-term with greater growth potential.

If your target retirement date is within five years or so, you may want to try and avoid any sharp falls in value and invest in less risky investments.

Remember, the value of the investments that you hold within your pension pot aren’t guaranteed and you could end up with less than is put in.

Choosing your investments…

Take the time to look at the types of fund available to you in your workplace pension scheme:

Each fund offered by your workplace pension scheme has a fund fact sheet. These include a risk rating so you can assess each fund’s risk-return profile on a like-for-like basis. Log in to your plan to see the fund fact sheet(s) that apply to you.

Our TargetPlan Risk Profiler allows you to assess what level of risk is right for you. You can then view the funds that match this risk profile. Log in to find out more about the Risk Profiler.

Remember, the risk rating doesn’t take into account your individual circumstances so it shouldn’t be the only measure you rely on when choosing a fund.

…and reviewing your investments

Once you've made your fund choice, it's good practice to keep your investments under review. Your appetite for investment risk and your personal circumstances can change, so it's a good idea to check regularly that you're still happy with the level of investment risk you're taking.

Important information

For the ‘Ups and downs’ chart above, we used market indices, not real investments. The performance of the funds you can invest in in any given market (emerging, UK, US etc) can vary greatly, some will perform better than the index, others worse, so the charts are for illustration only. Charges will also reduce the amount you can get back and these vary per fund as well. The figures are in £s sterling, on a month on month basis and don’t take the effect of charges or tax into account. If you’re looking at any performance figures, you should remember that there’s no guarantee that past performance will be repeated in future. All investments can go down as well as up in value and you should be aware that, with any investment, there’s a chance you could get back less than you invested, particularly over shorter time periods (less than five years). In the ‘Ups and downs’ chart, we would have liked to show you returns over 20 years or more but some of the indices didn’t go back that far so we went back as far as we could i.e. 19 years. The main thing is, it’s a long period and takes in a number of market shocks as well as market rises so it’s a good example of what can happen in good times and bad.

Please remember that regardless of what funds you choose, their value can fall as well as rise and you could get back less than is put in.